Digital lighting technologies, i.e., illumination based on semiconductor light sources, such as light-emitting diodes (“LEDs”), offer a viable alternative to traditional fluorescent, HID, and incandescent lamps. Functional advantages and benefits of LEDs include high energy conversion and optical efficiency, durability, lower operating costs, and many others. Recent advances in LED technology have provided efficient and robust full-spectrum lighting sources that enable a variety of lighting effects in many applications. Some of the fixtures embodying these sources feature a lighting module, including one or more LEDs capable of producing different colors, e.g., red, green, and blue, as well as a processor for independently controlling the output of the LEDs in order to generate a variety of colors and color-changing lighting effects, for example, as discussed in detail in U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,016,038 and 6,211,626, incorporated herein by reference.
Manually grouping lighting units into groups may be useful but tedious. Existing mechanisms are simple enough to use if the number of lighting units is small and/or unlikely to change over time. However, in situations where a potentially large number of lighting units may be logically grouped, e.g., on a chandelier or in a large area of a home or business, then manually grouping lighting units may be cumbersome, especially where some units must be replaced as time passes.